Typically, an LDAP infrastructure of a global enterprise, such as the single sign-on LDAP infrastructure, may be very large. For example, such an infrastructure may include 30 to 100 servers. Such a global enterprise may experience serious issues relating to LDAP server topology from time-to-time. For example, an outage in one LDAP server in the infrastructure may lead to an outage in another part of the infrastructure because an update does not reach servers in such other part of the infrastructure and such servers therefore become ‘orphaned’. Thus, it is important to know in advance what the impact would be if a server is removed from the infrastructure.
When the LDAP infrastructure is in the process of being designed, it is very difficult to determine whether or not a proposed server topology is fully matched in the sense that every server connects to every other server in the server topology. Thus, there is currently no suitable way to determine how well a particular server topology will perform, whether all the servers in the topology are receiving updates from multiple sources, and what problems may arise with the topology in the event one or more servers become orphaned. In a small infrastructure, for example, with less than four servers, it is quite easy to manually determine the quality of the server topology. However, as the number of servers increases, that task becomes increasingly complex.
There is a current need for an accurate model that allows designers to determine whether or not a proposed server topology will perform well in a production scenario and also provides the enterprise with guidelines for when an occasion may arise when it becomes necessary to take down one or more servers in the topology.